At 7:49 a.m. EDT (12:49 GMT), July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to the Pluto system, flying within 7,750 miles (12,472 km) of Pluto’s surface. At the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, more than a thousand people, including APL employees, mission team members, guests, and media […]

On the eve of New Horizons’ historic Pluto flyby, the decades-long question of Pluto’s size has finally been answered: Pluto is larger than previously thought – it has a diameter of 1,478 miles (2,370 km). The finding comes from images taken by the spacecraft’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI). It means Pluto is the largest known […]

With just days left until its historic Pluto flyby, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is taking and sending back images that reveal Pluto to be a geologically complex world. Fuzzy, blurry images are being replaced by sharper ones showing distinct surface features – to the delight of mission scientists.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft returned to normal science operations on Tuesday, July 7, the first official day of its long-anticipated Pluto encounter mode, with all of its seven instruments now active. In the early hours of July 8, on its second official day of the encounter, mission scientists received this latest picture of Pluto, featured above, […]

As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft rapidly closes in on the Pluto system on the outer fringes of the Solar System, its instruments are starting to reveal stunning details on the surfaces of both Pluto and its largest moon – Charon. These tantalizing new images are now raising new mysteries about these enigmatic worlds. These images came in at […]

As NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft closes in on the Pluto system, its instruments have begun returning images that show surprisingly varied surfaces on both Pluto and one of its moons – Charon. The latest series of images released by the mission team were taken with the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI ) between May 29 and June […]

A recent series of images captured by the New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Orbiter (LORRI ) from a distance of about 30 million miles (150 million km) reveal Pluto as a complex world with highly contrasting bright and dark regions, leaving scientists puzzled. These are just the latest images snapped on the road to Pluto – a journey […]

Images of Pluto taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Orbiter (LORRI) camera in mid-May show a level of contrast and complexity significantly beyond those taken only a month ago. As part of the mission’s ongoing process of transforming a point of light into a planet, the New Horizons team released a new set of […]

With just two months remaining until New Horizons’ July 14, 2015, Pluto flyby, the mission team released a complete Pluto “family photo” featuring the entire system with its five known moons. With the spacecraft speeding toward its primary target before continuing on its way to other potential targets located within the Kuiper Belt, the mission […]

On Feb. 18, 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, a young astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, discovered the planet Pluto while blinking images of the sky taken on Jan. 23 and 29 of that year, in an attempt to find anything that moved against the field of background stars. Eighty-five years later, NASA’s New Horizons mission […]

Almost exactly a year before its scheduled Pluto flyby, the New Horizons spacecraft, using its Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, photographed Hydra, one of the planet’s four tiny moons. The mission team did not expect to detect the tiny moon until January 2015, at which point the spacecraft will be twice as close to the Pluto […]